Housing abandoned plots, this is needed SE!!! Thank you!

[AnnietheCat]

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And yet there are plenty of other MMOs that don't remove your hard work once you get it, some of them f2p. This content is not accessible by every player, no matter how many inactive houses get removed. Siren alone has almost 100k players, and yet not nearly that much housing. And the most populated servers? So long as there isn't enough space for every person to have one house, removing inactive housing is not a viable solution. Instanced housing makes sure that everyone has equal access to the same content. Sure, I have a house. My FC has a house. But there are not enough plots in the game for every player. And do you not think continuously adding new wards takes up a lot of server space? That it isn't pricey to maintain? Idc how long someone has been inactive. scraping together millions of gil isn't easy across every server, and someone taking a hiatus shouldn't mean they lose the work they paid to put into the game.

[Iagainsti]

This is a problem that is only going to compound itself with time. Rapid inflation of gil means even mansions are becoming easier for regular single players to obtain meaning new plots that open up are potentially going to be taken up by a single character instead of a Free company.

Personal Housing needs to get instanced. Otherwise no matter how many inactive accounts you nuke the problem will be the same as it was.

What's wrong with me owning a personal mansion? I paid for it, and I need the space for all the furniture my retainers steal from others on Quick explore

[Ayerinn]

And yet there are plenty of other MMOs that don't remove your hard work once you get it, some of them f2p.

this is like buying a seat license at a professional sports park and then deciding you are not going to buy season tickets because you are going to be out of the country all season - you either pay for the tickets (subscription) and not use them (don't log in) or you give up your seat license (housing plot) so someone else can buy/use the tickets. It really is that simple...

[SQBoard]

The wards are on servers. Servers cost money to buy/maintain. If half of a ward is full of inactive un-subbed players then SE is technically not recouping costs for said ward; they would lose money if they continue to keep partially dead wards.

You see that's what's not making sense to me and i said this in the first part of what you quoted from me...SE is not losing money having inactive or empty (no house sold) wards because those wards are not instanced...they're basically permanent zones that gets loaded regardless of player use. Might as well say underused outdoor zones like Azys La are losing SE money if not enough players use it.

SE's cost in terms of servers to handle the existing wards has been set the day they added those wards whether they're used or not, that server cost will be the same unless they remove wards which is unlikely.

With something like a decay timer they ensure that the houses in the wards are filled with active paying players. By allowing active players to re-use those vacant houses they reduce the amount of new wards they have to buy/maintain server space for. Essentially it boils down to cost efficiency.

Now that part makes more sense. In the last part of what you quoted from me, i actually alluded to cost efficiency is better achieved with individual instanced housing because it's more scalable with an increase as well as decreasing (inactive) demand.

Instancing is actually more agile and adaptive to player demand but i already mentioned that this is academic at this point since it's unlikely to change. But it doesn't change the fact that all if not most of the current housing issues are better handled through instancing.

I'm not actually against inactivity timers...if used with instanced housing systems because you don't have to delete houses. With non-instanced, it adds a different problem trying to solve a problem.

[Valaska]

You see that's what's not making sense to me and i said this in the first part of what you quoted from me...SE is not losing money having inactive or empty (no house sold) wards because those wards are not instanced...they're basically permanent zones that gets loaded regardless of player use. Might as well say underused outdoor zones like Azys La are losing SE money if not enough players use it.

Those inactive houses with items in them etc are eating up resources that paying customers could use. For every house owned by an inactive account, SE looses MB's of data every millisecond one of these inactive thus meaning they are paying for that data transfer where a paying account would at least cover some of the computer costs for them. Any way you splice it, those inactive houses are doing damage to us active players who (yes not ALL) could fill them, and cover the costs of that data.

[SQBoard]

Those inactive houses with items in them etc are eating up resources that paying customers could use. For every house owned by an inactive account, SE looses MB's of data every millisecond one of these inactive thus meaning they are paying for that data transfer where a paying account would at least cover some of the computer costs for them. Any way you splice it, those inactive houses are doing damage to us active players who (yes not ALL) could fill them, and cover the costs of that data.

Not sure why the topic switched from server cycles to profit loss and now bandwidth cost. Alright, let's switch to bandwidth then. Yes, data is transferred to/from server when someone enters the zone and loads the current housing decor...data is also transferred when someone makes changes to their house and updates the client of every player in the ward. But those are used up by active players using the zone for the benefit of the active subscriber.

Also a note about bandwidth costs, they're much cheaper than other server related costs like cooling and electricity which those costs are already incurred after they installed the servers (if necessary) when they added the wards before anyone even bought a house.


*Sidenote: NCsoft's bandwidth cost for all their online games in their last quarter was 4,060 mn krw and their total revenue for those games was 196,566 mn krw.

[Neira]

I don't think adding in game taxes on plots would be fair at this point in existing wards - people purchased the land knowing there was no ongoing maintenance cost. Adding a cost over a year after implementation (of housing) is not a good idea. It's much easier to just say you have to have an active subscription and if your sub is inactive over X days your land is subject to forfeiture (90 days is the minimum to be fair imo, retroactive from when they implement the relinquishment.)

By that logic, adding an eviction policy at this point wouldn't be fair because people purchased the land knowing there wasn't going to be any sort of subscription requirement to keep your home. Yoshi P already said they wouldn't be doing this in an old Live Letter. It's bad enough he's a liar, it's worse to use the lie as a defensive point in a debate.

[Neira]

I think you are underestimating.....how many are held by the same person on different accounts!

I just want to point out, to you and many others who I've seen bring up people owning multiple houses and reselling, that the eviction will do nothing to fix that issue. Someone could still own eight houses on one account and leave them all abandoned shells for eventual resell just by alt-hopping once a month, and this "solution" that SE is offering us wouldn't help in the slightest. In fact, every lazy, ill-considered, cheap, and quick solution SE would jump on will have little effect, although some solutions will put more money in their pocket while they continue to low-budget the... second? best selling MMO ever.

Personally, I'm getting to the point where I'm daydreaming about buying an entire block of houses with my FC whenever they add new wards, just to sit on them for the sole purpose of irritating anyone who thinks SE is handling this issue well. I wouldn't ever do it because I think it's immoral and rude, but the fact I'm even fantasizing about it is just indicative of my exasperation at this shady choice SE is making, and the willingness of so many to accept it.

There are other solutions that would be more effective than the one they're proposing, but they would all take a cost investment. And since it seems in modern day business, an investment is a bad thing(seriously, that's what anyone defending this choice sounds like, and if you don't realize why that's funny, I encourage you to learn more about running a business), they're all unlikely to happen, especially when SE has an option that will get them more money for minimal effort. Unless there is a backlash from the consumers who don't want to continue paying more for less in this game; I know, unlikely, most of us apparently love to hand over our money without consideration.

1) An overhaul. There's been plenty of suggestions here, no reason for me to go into it, other than saying instanced is probably the most popular.
2) Increasing the amount of wards or add new subdivisions.
3) Add Help Desk housing related issues and refine the ToS. Instead of adding a mandatory decay timer when an absence may not be an issue, add a rule to the ToS along the lines of "Unused housing is subject to removal upon review after X days," which would both clear up houses being flipped or players simply being gone. It would also have the additional benefit of only evicting players who are taking up plots that are in demand, and effecting people less on smaller population worlds or wards that aren't as desired.
4) Separate FC and player housing.

All I can think of for the moment, but I'm just one simple person who is obviously going to miss other good ideas. The point is, in general, that SE can't keep treating a AAA MMO as if it's a low-budget F2P game. The total subscribers, profit margins, and sheer greed with their cash shop, retainers, and merchandise all point to a game that is incredibly successful, yet they seem to want to run it on a minimal budget. I'm honestly tired of it, and given their horrendous track record of scrounging for that extra profit, I can't see this recent idea as anything more than another cash grab.

And please, no one forget that they have other issues that boil down to server load. Anything positive they do to help with housing might also accidentally improve our servers in general, which I don't think would be a bad thing at all.

[Ayerinn]

By that logic, adding an eviction policy at this point wouldn't be fair because people purchased the land knowing there wasn't going to be any sort of subscription requirement to keep your home. Yoshi P already said they wouldn't be doing this in an old Live Letter. It's bad enough he's a liar, it's worse to use the lie as a defensive point in a debate.

except they were going to introduce such a system and it got loads of complaints (a lot from players that likely do not play anymore....go figure right?) ...leading us (in part) to the housing scarcity we have today. Rules are always subject to change. I personally have no problem subbing X months a year to be able to keep my house should I need to take an extended break from the game... would I prefer them to just keep adding more housing? Yes...and no. Yes because it causes the least amount of drama...no because what is the point of non-instanced housing if the wards are devoid of life due to dead plots from non-active players?

[Neira]

except they were going to introduce such a system and it got loads of complaints (a lot from players that likely do not play anymore....go figure right?) ...leading us (in part) to the housing scarcity we have today. Rules are always subject to change. I personally have no problem subbing X months a year to be able to keep my house should I need to take an extended break from the game... would I prefer them to just keep adding more housing? Yes...and no. Yes because it causes the least amount of drama...no because what is the point of non-instanced housing if the wards are devoid of life due to dead plots from non-active players?

I would prefer an in-game tax over a real money housing system, and make no mistake, that is what this is. The system as they've outlined it is requiring a recurring money investment just to access in-game content, there is nothing even subjective about that observation. It's no better than the extra retainers for a rental fee, and it reeks of underhanded business practices.

The worst part is, with both the retainer system and this one, that the issue is of their own creating. They knew inventory was an issue and would continue to be because they designed a system that introduces numerous new items every update, to the point of being too many to list in update notes. And they knew housing would be an issue because they introduced a system that only provided homes for a miniscule percentage of the player base, ranging from less than 0.1% to less than 2% depending on which time period you want to look at.

We're not in a situation such as this because people have taken a break from the game, because people are trying to flip in-game houses, or because there aren't enough people paying subscriptions; so adjusting any of those will not provide a solution to the problem. We're in this situation because SE made a choice to put no extra effort into personal housing(like they had implied they were going to), because SE has stifled their investment in this game, and because it will make them more money to provide a faulty system with profitable band-aids than to work out a functional system that would have endured better over time.

There is no one to blame here except SE and, at best, their continual lack of foresight or, at worst, their intent to coerce extra subscriptions from the players.